If the proliferation of floral print and crop tops or the planned remake of Point Break weren’t convincing enough, this fall’s fashion week paid homage to Sassy (beloved periodical of nineties teens), and the men’s magazine GQjoined the growing number of headlines in national newspapers and periodicals declaring that “we are likely entering a prolonged period of ’90s monomania.”

A good ghost story is never just about an apparition. It’s about the society that created that ghost, and what such a society fears: race relations, changing gender roles, disease, technology, foreignness.  Indeed, the thing that makes gothic writing so compelling, says Edith Wharton, is its ability to both explore and obscure the “unspeakable” — that real-life social anxiety hiding in the symbolic backdrop of the paranormal tale.

Every day in Berkeley we pass individuals who are so eccentric, so strange, so “out there,” that we often call them (without reflection) “crazy.”  But how do we decide between “crazy” and “unique”—between  those who might be considered genuinely “mad” and those who are simply “marching to the beat of their own drum”?  In this course we will consider madness in its many forms and characterizations in literature, film, and visual art.  Our study, however, will not be of madness itself so much as the way it exemplifies the close connection, for all of us, between what we see and the imaginativ